Law enforcement program gains new focus

The former law enforcement program at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College features new courses and a new name aimed at providing graduates “a deeper understanding of officers’ roles in ensuring justice and providing service,” the college announced this week.

The Criminal Justice/Peace Officer program was adopted to replace a focus on enforcement, and reflect “important changes in how officers serve their communities and interact with the public,” a news release said.

New courses include one titled Mental Health Crisis Management and another, Diversity and Intercultural Leadership, that will ask students to confront their biases.

To learn more about the changes, the Pine Knot spoke with program coordinator Mike Tusken, the former chief of police in Duluth.

“It will allow our students to come into employment as a peace officer much more aware of who they are and what their belief systems are, what their biases may be, and allow them to embrace diversity much better,” Tusken said.

The changes at FDLTCC spiraled out of a 2021 report by the Minnesota State Taskforce on Law Enforcement Education Reform, he said.

The goal of the taskforce was to “help to train culturally competent peace officer candidates,” said the report. A former program director at FDLTCC, former Cloquet police chief Wade Lamirande, was among the more than three dozen members of the taskforce.

“I knew if we could get these courses into our curriculum, we would improve the end product and outcomes for students when they get out and serve in their communities,” Tusken said.

Elsa Maxwell, a sociology professor, is teaching the diversity course, and Ed Franckowiak, who is a police officer in Duluth and licensed social worker, is teaching the other course on how to encounter mental health crises.

“Both classes are really groundbreaking,” Tusken said. “You can’t find them anyplace else in the state the way we’ve built them.”

One of the goals was to better immerse students in the community, Tusken said. Students in the program will be required to volunteer for 16 hours at Damiano Center in Duluth and at Duluth warming centers in the winter. Damiano Center offers a host of programming for impoverished people in need, including free meals and clothing.

“We have a more diverse population now,” Tusken said. “We wanted to create meaningful coursework that is going to have our students be aware of their own biases and be experiential in a way that it’s not just class lecture and theory.”

Like a lot of professions, policing is experiencing an employee shortage. The school graduated 22 students last year, less than half of what historical highs were but better than the program low of 13.

“Right now, there are 143 agencies in the state that are hiring,” Tusken said.

Increased wages are helping to slowly draw people back to the profession, he said, but “it’s a dog eat dog world,” with officers jumping from smaller agencies to those that pay more.

Tusken expects the enhanced curriculum will help young and new officers be better prepared — “day one ready to serve and make a meaningful impact,” he said. That’s particularly important, he added, if they land at one of the state’s many smaller agencies that don’t always have robust training budgets or programs.

How an officer starts a response can help change the outcome, Tusken said.

“We’re trying to figure out ways to improve outcomes, and reduce use of force — and use of deadly force, in particular,” he said. “We want to mitigate those incidents.”

The skills instructor of the FDLTCC Criminal Justice/Peace Officer program, Joel Olejnicak, billed the changes as transformative.

“Enrolling as a student in the Criminal Justice and Peace Officer program at FDLTCC is a first step to a lifelong commitment in one of the most noble professions known to mankind,” he wrote in a news release.

Tusken said the changes figure to make the school’s already respected program even more vital.

“It’s always been a great program,” he said. “Making these changes is only going to enhance the student experience and ultimately make them better capable to serve the communities they choose to work in.”